Equivalent bandwidth concept and its usage in the network selection

Maximize the resource utilization efficiency and guarantee the quality of service(QoS) of users by selecting the network are the key issues for heterogeneous network operators, but the resources occupied by users in different networks cannot be compared directly. This paper proposes a network selection algorithm for heterogeneous network. Firstly, the concept of equivalent bandwidth is proposed, through which the actual resources occupied by users with certain QoS requirements in different networks can be compared directly. Then the concept of network applicability is defined to express the abilities of networks to support different services. The proposed network selection algorithm first evaluates whether the network has enough equivalent bandwidth required by the user and then prioritizes network with poor applicability to avoid the situation that there are still residual resources in entire network, but advanced services can not be admitted. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm obtained better performance than the baselines in terms of reducing call blocking probability and improving network resource utilization efficiency.